Blockbuster games usually don’t have any edges. They’re sanded off by months of focus testing and quality assurance, until you’ve got nothing but an inoffensive sphere that rolls happily to market.

The worry is that if there’s anything sharp, someone’s going to poke their eye out. It’s safe, but then it has to be. Metro: Last Light has edges. It’s spiky all over.

Set after a nuclear apocalypse that left the surface of Moscow a poisonous mutated wasteland, the survivors are driven underground, into the city’s expansive Metro system.

Last Light picks up where Metro 2033 stumbled to a close, quickly ungarbling the confused ending and setting up a conflict between the different factions that define themselves by the subway lines that they squat on.

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The Communists of the Red Line, the Fascists of the interchange stations. The attempted neutrality of the Spartan Order.

Despite being a linear shooter, Metro: Last Light is a systemic game. There’s a rudimentary stealth system that, for the most part, holds up to scrutiny, providing a completely valid playstyle based around striking from the shadows and favouring silent and pneumatic weaponry.

The ubiquity of radiation and hostile gasses make gas masks a constant aid, and the requirement to watch how long your filter will last, ensure that the glass of your mask stays unbroken and, brilliantly, wipe blood and gunk off to keep your vision unobstructed add the kind of verisimilitude that’s so often lacking.

An argument could easily be made that these only dilute the experience, serving as distractions that pull your attention away from the actual experience of surviving in a post-apocalyptic Moscow, but that’s to ignore all the ways with which they enhance the experience.

They’re minimal mechanics on their own, but when they’re thrust into the Metro’s combat they pull and pull against one another, leaving you desperately wiping the gunk of one kill from your visor just as your headlamp dims, and you can’t quite make out the next mutant rat that’s trying to eat off your face.

You blind fire, just about make it out and desperately squeeze your battery back to life so that you can see your way through the psychotic darkness of the Russian underground.

The reason they all work so well is that they work in tandem with the setting to produce a feeling that is just about as cohesive as you can hope for from a game.

Every moment of Metro: Last Light is about selling you on the harsh realities of its very specific post apocalypse, and often it feels as if whatever concessions might have been made towards some intangible idea of ‘fun’ were simply ignored. Occasionally it’s genuinely to the detriment of the experience, but so much more often it only enhances. Guns have an extremely hapdash feel to them, with the most common variant being playfully referred to as the ‘Bastard’ for its tendency to miss the target more than it hits.

The ubiquity of pneumatic weaponry continues to sell the idea of people slapping together whatever they can, and adds another systemic layer as your gun runs dry on compressed air and you’re forced to pump away to keep it combat ready.

Similarly, the bullet economy from the first game makes a return, with handmade, low-impact rounds being common, and military grade rounds being rare enough to serve as a currency.

It’s another way of selling the fiction, that in a time as hard as this the only thing worthwhile is how many rounds you’ve got in the chamber, but Last Light does a better job of making them a resource rather than an abudance, meaning buying guns, ammo and upgrades becomes harder and harder to do the further you get from home.

And that journey is both more focused and less dramatic than the first game. In a lot of ways it feels like 4A Games, who developed Metro: Last Light, didn’t have anything to prove with Last Light, and told the story they wanted to tell, without any of the urgency that defined 2033.

There’s a lot less of the wide-eyed wonder, too, but that’s to be expected now that the world has been established. I can’t help but feel that a few of the more strange elements, like the tunnels haunted by the ghosts of the apocalypse, showing up only as shadows in the beam of your flashlight, could have made a welcome return here, if only because so many are going to come to Last Light with no knowledge of the original.

It’s only in retrospect that such contentions arise, however, because as you’re moving through the eight hours or so that Last Light takes to complete, you’re never left with a lack of things to look at or enjoy.

The underground society is brought to life with such an incredibly amount of verve and detail that it’s hard not to pause and admire the confidence and craftsmanship that went into creating such a world. Even looking at the most accomplished games’ attempts to bring a world to life, like Bioshock Infinite or Assassin’s Creed can occasionally be outshined by just how well 4A communicate Metro’s bleak but vibrant city.

For a game that attempts so much, from the extremes of human on human combat to the brutality of fending off the mutated animals of the Moscow overground, or the quiet loneliness of the few levels where you’re travelling alone through the tunnels to the many where you have a companion, or many, and the action appropriately escalates, it’s incredible how few missteps Last Light manages to make.

They are there, however, and for the brief time that they occupy your time, they frustrate almost enough to drag the rest of the game down.

The worst offender is a pair of overground levels where you move through vast swathes of marshland and river, where the wrong step can have you plunging into toxic sludge, to be eaten by whatever mutated animals inhabit the water.

If you weren’t being harassed by all manner of giant monsters it wouldn’t be such an issue, but when you’re forced to backpedal away from something that wants to tear your face off, taking a quick dip isn’t exactly what you have in mind. The sections aren’t all that short, either, and almost led me to quit out the game a few times.

The story, too, tends to try to juggle a few too many plot strands at once, and they’re all tied off a little too neatly as you reach the closing chapters.

Not to mention there’s allusions that there’ll be some sort of moral payoff to the few choices you’re presented with throughout the course of Last Light, and they’re not even acknowledged. As true to life as that may be, it leaves more than a little dissatisfaction when you’re finally faced with the credits rolling.

Those things aside, it’s hard not to feel like Last Light is the kind of game that can act as the cure to everything that shooters have been trying to pump us full of for the last few years.

There’s bombast, but it’s restrained and only used when appropriate. The environments, while shackled to the fact that you’re moving through subway tunnels for the vast majority of the time, somehow manage to be arresting on an alarmingly regular basis.

The combat has heft, unexpected twists and a wonderful attention to maintaining the tone and atmosphere that the world and story set up. And the world, despite being one of the bleakest I’ve travelled through, manages to sell itself as one of the most convincing at the same time.

Last Light is the rare shooter that lingers with you once you’re done with it.